KWord/Manual/Introduction

Welcome to Kword, a full-featured and powerful word processor and desktop publishing application.

Introduction

Kword is the word processing component of the Koffice desktop productivity suite, and also features the functionality necessary to serve as a desktop publishing application. The Koffice suite is designed to take full advantage of the features and functionality of the KDE desktop experience, and to integrate seamlessly with its native applications.

Frame-Oriented Word Processing

If you've been using Microsoft Word, Wordperfect, or OpenOffice.org you've become accustomed to page-oriented word processing. Kword is a frame-oriented word processor, which means a great deal more flexibility when it comes to modern content-based document creation. Documents rarely consist of just text anymore; they're more likely to contain a combination of text and objects such as pictures, charts, and graphs.

A frame-oriented word processor places text and other objects inside movable, re-sizable boundaries known as frames. If you create a default blank page a single frame is created, set to the margins of the page. You can add as many frames as you like and place them wherever they need to go. You can also connect two frames so that when the text overruns the first frame it flows into the second. The frame-oriented approach provides great flexibility of layout.